GATES OF PARADISE
by The Veiled Lady
Summary: When he reopened his eyes, Walter heard the noise of the pouring rain. The darkness and the silent ticking of the rain, amplified the sense of emptiness. Suddenly, Walter felt another pair of eyes on him. There was no one, yet Walter was certain that someone had been there. As he turned, something alarmed him: White skin, almost translucent. A man?


Folder 01

In the beginning there was a voice.

"I'm sending, MUTHUR can you hear me?" So it was that it began, a voice calling him in his sleep; a disembodied voice that sneaked in his most deep dreams, a timbre of deep tones, of inhuman echoes and low and stifled groans. It was familiar to him as his own voice, but Walter did not know if it came from inside his head, from off himself, or from a place not of this world.

"Receiving" The computer's robotic voice rang loud and clear in his headset.

"Open outer hatch." Ponderously, the outer lock hatch slid open. Clouds of steam swirl before the crew members. He limped forward, gritting histeeth and clenching his hands because of the impatience that's gripping his stomach. Walter reached the door and pressing a series of buttons on the control panel, he pulled the watertight chamber door as hard as he could. When the tailgate of the Airlock opened, a gust of cold wind hit him hard. Some dust pricked Walter's face and forced him to stop in the doorway. He took a deep breath, a great gulp of air and slipped through the opening.

For a moment, Walter was aware of only colors, not shapes. Stripes of gray, green, and brown so vibrant his brain couldn't process them. A gust of cold wind passed him over, making Walter's artifical skin tingle and flooding his nose with scents he couldn't begin to identify. He stopped to look at the situation, framed in the door of the hatchback. It was then that he forgot impatience and felt a multitude of words fluttering in his head as if suddenly he had been asked to make a judgment and find himself in the spasmodic search for adjectives, which he then abandoned, adjectives that had to make the point of the situation.

Empathic, he thought.

At first, all Walter could see were trees. There were hundreds of themhitreds, as if every tree on the planet had come to welcome him. Their enormous branches were lifted in celebration toward a charcoal sky. The ground stretched out in all directions, ten times farther than the longest deck on the ship. The amount of space was almost inconceivable, and Walter suddenly felt light-headed, as if he was about to float away. He felt so small, it made him sick.

All around, there was an immense royal forest: inaccessible and thriving. Rhododendrons, redwoods, and pines left enough light for an overabundance of plants. The wind's noises gave rise to the forest in a gentle discordance of sounds, as strangely synchronized to the occasional sound of twigs and leaves on which Walter trampled on.

The air was frozen and dense, Walter was forced to close his eyes. He massaged his nose suddenly frozen. Then, he became vaguely aware of voices behind him and turned to see a few of the others emerge from the ship. "It's beautiful," a dark-skinned girl whispered as she reached up to run her trembling hand along the grass.

A pale-curvy girl pushed him toward the outside. "Strength and courage!" Daniels labored breathing sounded in his ears via the radio channel. Captain Oram walked beside him and seemed to be at ease. He kept pace easily. Walter, focused, seemed to study the visible surface, while the radar and electromagnetic sensors scanned the area. He turned, looking around for some movement on the planet's surface. No trace of civilization.

And suddenly, it was bright and he recoiled.

It had been so long. No one had noticed the small and silent electrical discharges in its eyeballs. At first it was just a few sparkles. Then they began to grow in intensity. His gaze denoted the return to consciousness, however he did not attempt to get up. It remained motionless, giving time to its internal program to reverse the effects of an unauthorized deactivation.

His body curled around itself. The cold comfort of a stone pavement, Walter thought. The pleasant warmth surrounding him said safety, but a bright yellow light made him fear. Chaotic dream images flickered across his faltering artificial consciousness. Myriad of memories, fragments of swirling memories as fiery meteors rolled in the memory of Walter. It was certain that those memories did not belong to him. They were the reminiscences of someone else. It was like he was telling the plot of a movie he had seen and not lived, as if the memories belonged to someone else.

He could not focus on the room in which he found himself, when he opened his eyes, Walter heard the noise of the pouring rain on the temple walls. In front of him, a dark spot. A soft light illuminated the room. He blinked his eyelids, rubbed the sleep from his eyes. The darkness and the silent ticking of the rain, amplified the sense of emptiness. It was raining. Heavy solid gray rain. A ray of white sunshine, climbed along the high and solid walls of the temple in which Walter stood, still. The air smelled closed and old.

Moving the fingers of his right hand, he understood he was not in his body anymore. He had sensed it right away. Lying on the ground, on the cold stone floor, Walter could easily distinguish the grooves, the bevelled edges and the millennial engravings present on that sterile floor, hard to his artificial skin. He had never dwelt on such an insignificant detail. He looked at his arm, his left arm: it was there. His hand was there, in his place, five slender darting fingers moved to his command.

His liquids, those that can be assumed to be the equivalent of blood for humans, were now visible. A drop of that white jelly was dripping from both his nostrils and mouth. He wiped it off with his forearm. His eyes were stuck onto the enormous monumental heads of the amphitheatre.

As he got up on an elbow, stumbling a little, Walter reached for the entrance.

He looked around. Nothing. In front of him, the stairs of the temple, the square, the gates of the city from which they arrived last night. The silence all around. Walter, despite being just a bunch of scap and electric impulses, felt small, a vapid dot in the middle of everything.

The monumental square of petrified bodies that had greeted and welcomed his crew majestically, reminded Walter of the beautiful and gloomy Pompeii. Those bodies, paralyzed in a fleeing moment, forced into a black and smothered scream, resembled big black statues. The bodies of those "gods" lay, fused with each other. A cemetery of death and desolation. A theatrical scene, so fascinating and seductive. Quite disturbing.

The silence, the deepest silence he had ever dared to hear, embraced him in a asphyxiating vise.

With a slight pressure of his index finger, Walter activated the long-range communication system on his digital computer. _"Covenant, do you receive me? I'm Walter. "_ It was already the third time he repeated the same call phrase and had not yet received any response. _"I repeat, you receive me?"_ Nothing to do. The Covenant had now sailed without him.

Walter was alone, he was now aware of it. He had calculated the chances of escape: he would be stuck there, on that planet forgotten by God.

 _He had time to fix things._

Leaving the hall with the dome and its sulky carved heads, crossing the hall, Walter turned right then took the corridor to his left and entered a lateral corridor. He began to explore smaller adjoining rooms some of which kept examples of the art and advanced technology of the inhabitant of the planet, until he recognized a family and warm atmosphere, made of soft lights. The room was full of drawings that covered the walls and cluttered the floor. There were hundreds of them. They depicted scenes of life of the engineers, specimens of fauna and flora, modern and ancient humans.

The flutes room, David's personal room.

It was supposed to be David's "playroom". In his passage, the huge lamps hanging on the walls, recognizing perhaps his bodily presence, turned on slowly, and a warm yellow light spread throughout the cramped cockpit. Walter recognized the countless drawings and portraits affixed to the walls, the ones he had last saw the time David had caught him with his fingers on his, apparently so prized, flutes.

Walter continued to follow them with his gaze, touching the leaves from time to time to let himself be guided. Absorbed in his own thoughts he did not realise how far he had strayed from the vast hall with the dome. He moved deeper into the room.

Fumbled with a distant look, what Walter's large blue lenses could distinguish were flutes, sheets and thick graphite slats. He passed the room, going over there was a small vestibule, then a tapestry just ajar at the entrance of another room lit up in the twilight. Walter came in, shifting with his hand the heavy and rough tent. Crossed the door, he saw an innumerable amount of portraits, hung on the walls, hanging from the ceiling. On the right, a niche contained a series of engraved black vases, containers of different sizes.

Walter was barefoot. He soon began to scuff his feet along the floor, continuing to look at the red dust that stood around the skinny tapered feet. Walter approached the niche, his hand proclaimed to caress the smooth, harsh and cold surface of those sterile containers. He did not know what could be concealed inside those vases, and for the moment he was not going to find out.

He turned, and went back to scouring with his gaze and his spirit the rest of the room. Large stone tables, mighty and resistant, were placed on the sides of the room. He did not know, however, if David had already found them there, or if he had placed them. With his right hand, grazed the bevelled and gritty edges of the tables that stood at his feet. The tables were full of all things.

The gigantic body of an engineer attracted Walter's attention. The visage revealed was human, except for its giant scale. White-skinned. Hairless. Withered but beautiful as a Greek statue. Eyes closed. An expression of suffering on its face.

 _"And God created man in his own image."_

The corpse was laid on a table, and with surgical precision _someone_ had removed the outer layers of skin, fat and muscles to leave to sight an anatomy of tendons and nerves and bones.

Everything was represented with extreme meticulousness. Yet, Walter immediately understood that it was not a human model. The nose, from the hard and firm line, was not tapered like that of any human. And he, of humans, had known many.

This nose was different. Too prominent. He stood on an ephemeral, pale and hairless face. The posture reminded him, oddly or perhaps by sheer coincidence, that of Michelangelo's David. The hand bent towards the chin, the gaze fixed and far on something unattainable.

A large amount of equipment and devices was crowded in front of a large slab of polished material, similar to a mirror. Walter stood in front of it, scrutinizing with his thoughtful air his reflection: a cold draft coming in through the entrance of the temple made Walter turn towards it. He took a flap of his own sleeve and wiped off the mirror and he finally saw himself reflected in it. He turned his head on one side and then on the other.

His body, he could feel it, was not his anymore. He felt weighted, slow, as if they had installed his operating system on a puppet. Walter looked closely at the mirror, observing that blurred image, that beveled portrait reflected in that opaque and poorly defined surface. Holding his hair back, he inspected his image from different angles, "Who am I?" he asks. It took him a moment to realize the man he stared at was himself reflected in a mirror, so he made a few faces until one satisfied him. He had blue big eyes and skin marked by time and traveled by deep wrinkles and small scars. He stroked his face with his wide and calloused hands.

"My eye is no longer my eye, my mouth is no longer my mouth, my leg is no longer my leg..." . Walter pinched his cheeks, combed his frizzy and short hair with his fingertips. He gently caressed his face, then his stiff neck: a long scar runs through his neck throughout his circumference. "Something's gone wrong..." He continued to stare at himself and slowly nodded in satisfaction. David's body looked sophisticated.

He wore a tight faded and patched jumpsuit. On the right shoulder and on the chest he could recognize some faded characters: "Prometheus". Oh, yes.

 _The failed mission_

Walter performed a backup of the data in its memory. A neo positioned carefully under his chin is the key to all his questions. With his fingertips, he touched that shaggy dot which contracted to the merest contact.

He crushed it, pushed it and grabbed it, extrapolated it from the flesh, from the skin. Curious, Walter looked at him, he kept it on the tip of his index. Closing his fingers, his pupils zoomed the little black dot. Then, he ingested it. A voice in Walter's head animates, MUTHUR's voice. Walter's board computer seizes him for a few minutes. Its circuits are damaged and need some maintenance. His system is infected and many of the data stored in it are gone lost, deleted. However, part of his memory is still working.

Part of his data is lost, yet new data and new files have been, perhaps erroneously, implanted. David must have implanted his memory in his body, but in doing so it must have been some form of block, or virus, which has made that part of his memory and few memories of David remain merged together, stored in David's body. Some trashed files, in a poorly functioning body.


End file.
